Continuity of therapy is a vital component of quality care for people with serious mental illnesses and must be given more attention by consumers themselves, family members, advocates, providers, administrators, and researchers alike. At the moment, there is an important opportunity to develop a national consensus statement on the principles and practice standards that should form the basis of a continuum of therapy designed to provide realistic assurance that consumers can access vital medications when and where they are needed. Important strides have been made in identifying the specific factors which promote continuity of therapy - it is time to seize this important opportunity as yet another stepping stone to achieving the transformation of America's mental health care system for the benefit of consumers and their families, our communities, and our Nation. A roundtable of mental health experts has developed a set of nine recommendations for enhancing continuity of medication therapy for persons with schizophrenia or serious mental illness, including schizophrenia. They are as follows:
Mental Healthcare Recommendation #1 -
Encourage collaborations between hospitals and community-based organizations. Use fiscal incentives to foster collaborations including the standardization of information and shared electronic health records.
Mental Healthcare Recommendation #2 -
Use a quality improvement approach to enhance continuity of therapy by benchmarking at the organizational level performance and outcomes standards regarding continuity of care.
Mental Healthcare Recommendation #3 -
Ensure all consumers have a level of care management for the transition from inpatient to community. Care management services should be reimbursable by all payers and the disincentives to providing it should be removed.
Mental Healthcare Recommendation #4 -
Hospitals and community providers should focus on the "Pull Model" of transition from inpatient to outpatient care. The Pull Model focuses on involving community-based providers in the transition planning process from the beginning. Provider organizations should focus on staff competency in engagement and strategies and motivational interviewing.
Mental Healthcare Recommendation #5 -
Accreditation standards should be aligned to address and improve continuity of therapy in treating serious mental illness. This may include developing standards to ensure evidence of an active process of care management and transition between levels of care, a quality review of the success of transition plans, and measuring engagement.
Mental Healthcare Recommendation #6 -
Consumers and their families should be educated about the benefits of maintaining their personal health care history. Ensuring that consumers have detailed information about their illnesses and treatment history will help ensure that providers have access to the information they need to provide appropriate care in a timely manner. The options here range from simple paper and pencil logs and medication histories to electronic records on memory sticks.
Mental Healthcare Recommendation #7 -
Consumer-driven recovery planning should include and the appropriate and necessary use of hospitalization. More thoughtful use of inpatient services could lead to a reduction in emergency room use and ultimately to a decrease in the number of hospitalizations.
Mental Healthcare Recommendation #8 -
Parties who collect data about mental health services and performance should share it with appropriate stakeholders in usable and timely ways. Many payers and public entities collect both population and individual specific information about mental health consumers and services. Population-based data should be shared with all stakeholders, including families and consumers to aid in enhancing the system of care.
Mental Healthcare Recommendation #9 -
There should be meaningful involvement of consumers and their advocates in all levels of system delivery and evaluation. Global involvement of consumers and their advocates in the care delivery process is essential. Examples include using peer specialists as part of a treatment team, active involvement in policy and planning, as well as involvement in developing and implementing performance measurement and evaluation.
Applying these Mental Healthcare Recommendations -
While we have learned that maintaining continuity of therapy has a positive impact on consumer outcomes, the barriers and other impediments to ensuring this continuum of care have been long entrenched in mental health and related care systems. An unacceptably high number of people with serious psychiatric issues - including schizophrenia, depression and bipolar disorder - are "falling between the cracks" in the transition between acute inpatient settings and the community causing harm and disruption in their own lives and those of their families and often bringing their recovery process to a halt.
A continuity of therapy initiative is likely to decrease inappropriate use of emergency room services by consumers with schizophrenia or other serious mental illnesses by assuring consistency in the disease management approach used by all community provider organizations. Both of these likely outcomes of continuity of therapy provide cost reductions for the hospital and cost offset for the investments in continuity of therapy initiative and related therapies.
In addition, the continuity of therapy initiative provides the community hospital with another very tangible benefit. The continuity of therapy initiative provides the relationships, process, and infrastructure for an overall discharge planning functionality for all consumers with mental illnesses. This discharge planning functionality is a new, and critical, element in modern behavioral health standards that began in 2007.
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